Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘I wish we didn’t have him with us.’

  ‘That also is inevitable,’ Vance said. ‘They have a right to be with us – somebody killed Bartram and the rest. Either it was Tramelo or something out there in the jungle.’

  ‘Marvin and I didn’t find any genetic variance at Edzell.’

  ‘Edzell is close to Abellia as far as this planet is concerned. Besides, we’re on the other side of the Eclipse Mountains now. If there is variance, it might begin to show up here. The biolabs are scheduled to start local sampling in a few days, once the tanker Daedalus has built up our fuel stocks.’

  ‘All right. So who do you want to interview next?’

  ‘Send Omar Mihambo in. I’m curious what he was doing so close to the cargo row at that time of the morning.’

  *

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Private Omar Mihambo said. ‘That’s all.’

  Vance regarded the hulking young man squeezed uncomfortably into the chair opposite, and relaxed. The poor private was clearly unhappy at being called in; didn’t know why he was here, suspected nothing. An innocent. The smartdust Vance had spread on the arms of the chair confirmed his heartrate and perspiration levels were those of someone close to panic. He had no control over his impulses, even his youthful face was open, a veritable playground of emotion.

  Unless of course he was a one-in-ten like Angela, a trained agent making a mockery of Vance’s improvised lie detector. A corporate black ops infiltrator, part of the same operation that murdered the Newcastle North, and Sid’s suspicions were right.

  Vance shook his head in annoyance. Focused. ‘And you heard the commotion?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Who was there when you arrived?’

  Omar Mihambo stared at the ceiling, brow furrowed with the effort of recall, the need to satisfy. ‘The paramedics. Some of the logistics corps boys, but they were going for the trucks.’

  ‘Where were the trucks?’

  ‘Really close. It didn’t take them long to get them over. Trouble was lifting without making the damage worse.’ His lips pressed together. ‘Mullain’s ribs were pulped. You could tell as soon as they got the pallet off he wasn’t going to make it, he was just mashed-up meat from the chest down.’

  ‘So who arrived next?’

  ‘I’m not sure. The North was there, I know that. And Dorchev. Some of the catering people, I don’t know their names. It was a crowd by the time they took him away.’

  ‘What about before? When you ran over did you see anyone else in the area?’

  ‘Not really. There were a few of us heading for the paramedics. We all got there more or less together.’

  ‘Nothing odd?’

  ‘The monster? No. It wasn’t there.’

  Vance almost envied Mihambo’s simplistic version of the universe. ‘Tell me about Angela Tramelo.’

  ‘What about her? She wasn’t there.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t see her there?’

  ‘No sir,’ Mihambo said defensively. ‘I did not see Ms Tramelo there.’

  ‘All right, Private, calm down. Corporal Evitts asked people if they could confirm she was in the tent that night. Were you one of those who confirmed that?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I told you, I couldn’t get to sleep. I just dozed. It’s the heat. Quartermaster should never have given us black tents, it’s stupid. She was on her cot each time I looked round.’

  ‘All right; what about the rest of the time? Are you getting on all right with her?’

  ‘Yes, sir. She’s one of the good guys. What they did to her in prison was plain wrong.’

  ‘You do know what she was accused of, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir, first thing she told us. She didn’t do it. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To find the alien that did.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s why we’re all here.’

  *

  ‘I wondered when you’d call me in,’ Angela said as she sat in the chair. Her eyes narrowed and she frowned down at the armrests. ‘That’s a strange place for a mesh. Oh, unless you want to monitor the body signs of anyone who sat here. Now why would you want to do that, Elston?’

  Vance resisted a groan. For someone who’d come out of prison without any smartcells or e-i she’d managed to upgrade remarkably well. ‘People lie. About many things. About their age.’

  ‘You didn’t ask a lady how old she was, did you? I’m shocked.’

  ‘Where were you when Mullain was killed?’

  ‘Killed?’ She gave him an accusing stare. ‘So it wasn’t an accident?’

  ‘Accident stretches credibility. Not that I can prove anything. So where were you?’

  ‘In the shower where I was getting fucked by Paresh. He enjoys what you can do with a little bit of soap and water.’

  ‘Clever. A gangbang is always a good alibi, especially for the star of the show.’

  ‘I’m strictly a one-man woman, Elston. If I did it, so did he.’ She choked down a laugh. ‘Oh my, you actually considered that for a moment, didn’t you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Lucky for you there aren’t any meshes on your seat. Right?’

  ‘Had you ever met Mullain? Talked to him?’

  ‘Christ no. Some HDA nonentity – why would I bother?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Why am I here? You don’t really think I was involved?’

  ‘No. I need a different angle on this, something outside the usual command structure. You’ve bedded down nicely with your squad.’

  ‘Ouch. Elston, that was quite sophisticated for you.’

  ‘So is there anything going down that I should know about? Blackmarket for kit. Tox?’

  Angela shook her head slowly. ‘No. Nothing like that. Not yet. We’ve only just arrived. It’ll happen though.’

  ‘I know it will. I need to know if it already has.’

  ‘No. Sorry. I can’t give you a motive.’

  ‘Rumour? A fight over a woman? A man?’

  ‘Hell, you’re desperate to explain this. No. No rumours.’

  ‘All right. Thanks.’ He gave her a dismissive hand gesture. She remained seated.

  ‘Omar said he was a mess when they found him,’ Angela said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what did the post mortem say?’

  ‘There won’t be one, not here,’ Vance explained. ‘The bodybag’s on the next Daedalus flight out. They’ll take him back to Earth. I expect there will be an inquest in Newcastle.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She let out an exasperated hiss. ‘I’m a . . . scrap that. You’re an alien monster with blades for fingers. You’ve just stabbed Mullain through the stomach, eviscerated him. How do you cover that up? Perhaps you’d consider pulverizing the corpse?’

  ‘Shit!’ Vance glanced up, to see Antrinell was looking as shocked as him.

  Angela got to her feet. ‘You really are crap at your job, aren’t you?’

  Thursday 28th February 2143

  As the night’s mellow ringlight was supplanted by the sharper glare of Sirius rising, the hillside teeming with venichi vines began to change colour, the air itself turning thick, smearing the slope of glossy olive-green leaves with an oily orange haze. As the stronger light struck the vine, the underside of every leaf shook and shivered, casting loose the minute spores which clotted their surface. Venichi vines always released their spores at dawn so the day’s turbulent thermals would carry them as far as possible before the stiller night air permitted them to drift down.

  The cloud expanded quickly, oozing down the gradient to sweep out over the flat land beyond, thinning and spreading as it went. By the time it enveloped Camp Sarvar it was more tenuous than smoke, but still cohesive enough to contaminate the sunlight.

  Angela was oddly entranced by the uneven orange stain swirling through the sky, though she detested the constant urge to sneeze which the granules inflicted upon her. So she steeled herself agains
t the discomfort as she stood at the edge of the expanse of battered grass which was Camp Sarvar’s helicopter landing field. Fifty metres away, the Berlin’s turbines started up, sending a shimmering haze out of the notar exhaust grids at the end of its tail. There was a moment when she wondered if the spores would affect the turbines, reducing their efficiency, and cancel the takeoff. But Ravi Hendrik fed power to the big coaxial blades, and both sets began to spin up to a blur.

  She could just see Elston’s head through the curving cockpit transparency, disguised in a sturdy helmet with a broad dark visor. Her hand raised in a mocking salute as the Berlin lifted, and moved slowly across towards the end of the cargo rows, where a bulldozer was waiting. It took several minutes for the logistics corps team to fasten and check tethers, but eventually the helicopter rose again. There was a slight pause as the tether took the strain, then the yellow bulldozer was tugged off the ground, wobbling about in the powerful downdraught. The five squad members who’d gathered round to watch with her cheered half-heartedly.

  ‘Four days without him,’ Paresh said with a sense of satisfaction.

  Angela didn’t share the relief. There were times when she thought she and Elston were the only people on the expedition who took the alien seriously. Now Elston was flying up to Wukang, the first of the three forward exploratory camps, two thousand kilometres to the north-west, assuming his post as camp commander. If they kept to the kind of high-pressure schedule used to establish the existing camps, then it would be three days before the dozers and compactors would have finished preparing a runway. Angela and the squad would then fly out in a Daedalus; a simple civilian adviser didn’t rate a helicopter flight. In the meantime, Elston had told her, Antrinell would be supervising her.

  She’d seen the tiny lapel pin that was always on Antrinell’s fatigues. Another Gospel Warrior. Another religious fanatic to whom facts and reality took second place to dogma. He’d been keen enough to have the autopsy on Mullain. And they’d all been relieved when Doc Coniff had found no signs of a five-blade stab wound among his tattered entrails.

  Despite that, Elston had pushed Commander Ni into increasing the camp’s security. Smartdust meshes were smeared everywhere, watching over the whole area inside and out. Legionnaires patrolled the perimeter at all times. That hadn’t gone down well with Peresh’s squad, nor any of the other Legionnaires. They were used as a general workforce by the rest of the camp, and now they had additional duties. Paresh himself was particularly upset; the opportunities to be alone with her were reduced still further. For two nights she’d been virtually alone in the oppressively hot tent; a shower together was a rare event, and there was no leaving the camp on foot for a little privacy. Still, at least it made him more appreciative when they did manage to snatch a secluded moment to couple.

  ‘When do you go out on patrol?’ she asked.

  ‘Forty minutes. We’ll be out for six hours. Captain Chomik wants us to familiarize ourselves with the whole area. Possible infiltration routes, counter-tactics, observation points; we’re to make it our home turf.’

  ‘He’s taking things seriously, thankfully. I wish I could make you do the same.’

  ‘Hey, I know they’re out there.’

  ‘You just tell me that so you can get laid.’

  ‘No. I know you well enough now to know you never killed anyone. So it has to be real, right?’

  ‘Yep, that’s good enough to get you laid today. When did you say your patrol finishes?’

  Paresh couldn’t quite keep the happy gleam from his face. ‘We’ll be back around seventeen hundred hours, then I’ll have a debrief with the lieutenant.’

  ‘Six o’clock, then. That gives me long enough to find somewhere private.’ She looked round at Sarvar in its ginger pallor, the cargo rows that were still lengthening with every Daedalus flight, the fuel bladder store, lines of parked vehicles, and the tent town. ‘This camp is big enough, now.’

  ‘I wish we didn’t have to skulk around like this. We’re grownups, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘I know. But the HDA has its rules. The last thing I want is to damage your career. We’ll cope just fine. Then when all this is over, we’ll talk about the future.’ That last was to stop him doing anything stupid like declaring how much he loved her, or wanted them to walk off into the sunset together. She wouldn’t put it past the puppy boy to blurt it out, his world view was that simple. And if he did go and make an ass of himself she’d have to play along, which ultimately would mean hurting him badly when he realized how he’d been manipulated, that he was simply a commodity she’d traded.

  Twenty years in jail must have given her more of a conscience than she’d realized. That or she’d become weak. It had never bothered her before, certainly not with Barclay, who by letting her into his life had unknowingly supplied her with all the codes she needed.

  *

  It was balmy that long-ago night, as all nights were on St Libra. The air was ripe with the scent of the sea as Angela walked down the gallery that ran the length of the mansion’s seventh floor. She was naked except for a lace-trimmed black velvet choker and a towel from Bartram’s bedroom slung over her shoulder. There was nobody else awake at this time, so her only real worry was that she might leave some tell-tale oil smears on the marble floor as she went. Earlier that evening the other girlfriends had taken it in turn to give her erotic massages while Bartram voyeured their sapphic performance. Each one had applied more oil, and now her skin was simply covered in the stupid stuff. But she had to take the risk – there wouldn’t be a better opportunity than this.

  There were no security sensors on the seventh floor. Bartram was quite obsessed about his privacy, and didn’t want to risk some bytehead punk hacking into the mansion’s network and watching him through his own sensors. Security in the mansion, therefore, was perimeter based, geared up to make sure nothing untoward got inside and up to the seventh floor, which was where Bartram actually lived.

  Along with the mansion’s senior staff, Angela and the other girlfriends had their rooms on the sixth floor. Most nights they would be dismissed from Bartram’s bedroom when they’d finished satisfying him, and have to go back downstairs to sleep. There were a lot of nights when they were back down on six, after they’d showered and changed, that they’d all congregate in one of the rooms – without Marc-Anthony hovering as he did all day every day – and they’d wind up drinking an unauthorized bottle of wine and chattering like sisters. Angela had resisted at first, content with Olivia-Jay’s friendship, but after two months at the mansion she was so bored with the daily routine she gave up and joined in.

  But not tonight. Tonight, Karah, Coi, and Mariangela (Lady Evangeline’s replacement) had been sent back down to the sixth floor after getting all hot and slippery with Angela, leaving her and Olivia-Jay with Bartram as a threesome. Forty minutes later, Bartram was snoring softly with Olivia-Jay curled up beside him, also sleeping soundly, as well she might after combining that much tox with champagne. Olivia-Jay only had another ten days left on her contract, and she was trying hard not to show how disappointed she was about not being offered a renewal. Angela rolled off the bed and went into the en suite for some towels to rub as much oil off her legs and feet as she could.

  The big windows at both ends of the gallery were open, and all the lights were off, leaving dusky-silver ringlight alone to illuminate her way. There was a moment when she thought she heard someone else moving about. No one else should be anywhere near the seventh floor at that time. The dark weapon implants in her hands switched to semi-active status. She simply couldn’t risk discovery, not yet. But it was just the gauzy drapes fluttering slowly as the mellow sea breeze gusted through.

  Bartram’s study was halfway along the gallery. Angela stopped in front of the tall dark wood door, and checked both ways. Nothing moved, no alarms sounded. She opened the door and slipped inside. The study was decorated in the same faintly retro-Egyptian style that pervaded the rest of the mansion. Bartram had a thin
g for the lifestyle of old royalty, and believed that the stark, expensive aesthetics of the pharaohs contained an elegance and impact which the lavishly opulent palaces of later European monarchies lacked. There weren’t many ornaments in the room, but those that did rest on pedestals and in alcoves had been acquired from auction houses for tens of millions of Eurofrancs. Angela smiled bleakly at them, immune to their beauty and history.

  Bartram’s slab-like ebony desk had three big console panes set into its surface, resembling windows into interstellar night. Angela took the choker off, and slid her thumbnail along the slit on the inside. The velvet peeled apart to reveal the tiny interceptors hidden inside, like fat silver needles. She put the towel down on the floor, and lay down on it, shuffling her way underneath the desk. The undersides of the consoles were above her now, and she began to apply the smart needles against the correct locations on the casing of the middle one. Data began to flow across the contact netlenses she was wearing, showing her what to do, the progress they were making. It had taken months of practice to perfect the procedure, more time even than she’d spent memorizing football crap. She muttered instructions to the little systems as they wormed their way into the console’s internal circuitry and optical pathways, bypassing the inbuilt activation security systems.

  The subversion took an achingly long ten minutes. Angela wriggled out from underneath the desk as the central pane came alive, showing the console’s basic management architecture: a tunnel hologram with icon levels stretching down towards the bottom of the universe. A keyspace projection materialized above and to one side of the pane. Angela smiled down at it, and pushed her hands into the floating array of sharp red symbols. The console read the biometric pattern of the hands, and agreed they were Barclay’s. A new layer of icons materialized in the pane, and she let out a long breath of relief; the mimic gloves she’d put on as she got dressed that evening had not only survived all the oil, they’d replicated the pattern which the grabber gloves had recorded weeks before.

  She started manipulating the keyspace. Barclay’s codes allowed her into the finance office of Abellia’s Civic Administration. Barclay’s codes, exposed by the little processors in the banana cufflinks, following and recording every tiny movement of his hands and fingers as they flicked through keyspace.